Talking with DAN FRANK Artist Relations at Trueline Drumstick Company

Q: Dan, I know that you have had a number of different positions in your history with the Trueline Drumstick Company. How about a little background on the company and you?

DAN: Trueline actually started back in 1970, with my ex-partner Lalo Barcelo. Lalo used to wrap his sticks with tape and make a lump in them. So the seed was planted way back then. Somewhere around the turn into the '80s, he had gone into a music store, pulled out a bunch of sticks, rolled them, and said to the guy behind the counter, "These aren't very good. I could do better than this!", and the salesman said "Do it!" So Lalo went home and built jigs, figured out lathes, and thought that if he was going to make these, he was going to make them the way that he wanted. He made them underneath his garage overhang, taking three or four minutes to get a rough shape of each stick, using a router and a track that he built from a square piece of wood. He made a few, gave them to his friends, and those friends gave them to other friends. Soon after that, they were actually making drumsticks and making a little money. The stores in San Diego then started saying, "Why don't you cut us in on this, and sell them to us instead of directly to drummers?"

In 1981 the company officially bought machinery and started up. Lalo and his ex-partner Marco Zotolo ran the company for about 6 years. In 1987, I was going through the telephone book for a True Value hardware store, and came across Trueline, and I remembered them. I had just had finger surgery about four months earlier, so it had been on my mind to find this company anyway, and I ended up working there. At this point, though, they were basically out of business. Lalo and his present partners' interest had kind of died off, as nobody really had the passion. The other partners said to me, "Here, you want to do it, you can have the company, it's yours." So, in 1987, after being a factory worker for about five months, I became co-owner with Lalo Barcelo.

The basic difference between now and pre-1994 is that now, I mostly work with a telephone and computer. Before, I hauled wood off semi trucks, cut it out of the factory and cut boards down, then down again with a bandsaw into blanks to be made into sticks. When the sticks came off the back knife lather, I sanded sticks, stamped sticks, hand lacquered, hand polished, finally sanding, tipping, rolling, playing, packing, shipping and all paperwork. Pre-1994, my ex-partner and I really made drumsticks in a handcrafted way.

From 1987 to 1994, the two of us ran the company. At the end of 1993, we decided that we just didn't have the money to advertise like the other companies were, so we decided to sell. In 1994, Trueline was sold to two guys in Tucson that had knurling processing. That was their addition to Trueline. When Dick Podolec of Moot Wood Turnings bought the company at the beginning of 1995, he not only got Trueline, but also the knurling process. That's also how the company got from San Diego to Vermont. About nine months later, I was contacted by Trueline, asking if I would consider coming back to work for them in Artist Relations. I said that I would, only if the quality of the stick was the same as when I left the company. When Lalo and I owned the company, we made the Roll Royce of drumsticks. We selected boards by looking at the grain for each model. We would cut a whole board at a time for one model. If we need fifty 5A's, we would cut two or three boards that looked identical, so the weight was the same, and you had a natural twin. Anyway, when I got back into the company, the quality was good, so I started getting endorsers back on.

Soon, I took over the trade show, the marketing, and getting the domestic reps working. I also took over the Internet frontier. It's been my consistent passion for this company that makes me chew up more of what the company actually does. Now, Trueline is streamlined to where it does production and accounting, and I basically do the rest.

Q: Have any other companies attempted to come out with something similar?

DAN: I have seen two other prototypes of what we do. One is from Mexico, and the kind of wood they used is similar to oak, but it’s not. It did have an oak feel to it, with a great deal of vibration, kind of an unstable stick. The other one was done by a Swiss company, and they moved the grip backwards, thinking that that would be the better place. Trueline had spent months talking to drummers and trying different feels to get the grip in the right place. The balance of the Trueline copies was really awful, and searches I’ve done since then turned up nothing on those companies.

When Trueline builds the sticks, there are a different set of blades that make the TG Rock, Jazz and small sticks, as opposed to the 5A, 5B, and 2B. Each stick size is designed slightly differently, because of the profile of each stick. The profiles of each stick are designed in unison with the neck, shaft diameter, grip, height, and the way that some have a dramatic grip, and some have a less dramatic grip.

Q: How long has the Natural Diamond been in the Trueline catalog?

DAN: It’s been in the Trueline lineup since 1985. The original company and manufacturer of the knurling machine is a guy by the name of Brad Siebert. In 1993 he designed the machine, and contacted us to see if we wanted to buy it. At the time will we were not interested. Shortly after, he bought Trueline, and in 1994 they started commercially producing the Diamond Grip. But, they were all kinds of problems in having a drumstick company in Tucson, so that lasted about nine months, and was then sold to Moot Wood Turning.

Q: So then there’s the Classic stick, which is much more conventional than the other Trueline products. How does that sell compared to the more innovative designs?

DAN: That’s very interesting . . . I would say that it’s about twice as popular as I would expect it to be. Before we had the Natural Diamond stick, we had the Classic. This was pre-1994, and our endorsers were about 50/50 TG and Classic. The TG stick is kind of black and white...if you like it, that’s it. It’s what you’ve been looking for to let your hands relax, and still play harder. If you don’t like the grip, you’ll never like the grip. There is no gray in there. Many of our endorsers that play the Classic sticks like them because they tend to have a heavier neck, so for a lot of drummers, that translates to a more durable stick for them. They last longer on the cymbals, and the tips don’t break off as easy, because we make more stick at that part. Out of our non-TG players, it’s about 60% that play the Diamond, and 40% play Classic.

We currently make two sizes of timbale sticks. We call them the "Professor" and the "Little Professor." Before 1994, those sticks were called Salsa and Timbale. At that time, we also didn't make any TG sticks with wood tips. They were only butt-ended sticks. They didn't have a classic neck, either. When Lalo originally designed them, he thought, well, if you're playing a wood tip you probably want more volume and a warmer tone, so you might as well play a butt end.

Q: How does Trueline determine which artists to use for your signature line of sticks?

DAN: For an endorser to be at the status where we're going to name a stick after them, they have to be an exceptional player, and it must be a design that is not currently made. Danny Carey wanted a stick that was in between two sizes. It's bigger than a TG Rock, but smaller than a TG 5A, with some diameter taken off at the neck. So with those properties, it is in addition to what we already make. It must be a new size of that actually creates a new product for us.

Q: Are there any new signatures sticks in the making?

DAN: There are. There's the new Billy Ward stick coming out in early 2000. He's playing a TG Rock wood tip, rounded bead. This is a stick that Billy has been playing for seven years. We're also coming out with a Daniel Glass stick. He's the drummer of Royal Crown Review. It's a swing stick, very similar to our 5A, but we take a little off the neck and extend the bead a little longer, and a little flatter. It makes it more of a rebounding stick.

Q: I was in the Trueline factory recently, and it was pretty impressed with the way you attach the nylon tips. Is that process unique, or do other companies do it that way as well?

DAN: I know that up until 1994, when my ex-partner and I still owned the company, that process was exclusive to us. I don't know if anyone else is doing it now. I always thought that Lalo designed that just for me, because he always thought that I was a bit messy and a bit of a klutz, and that if I dealt with glue, I would make a mess of things! He designed the stick so that at the very end, instead of being sharpened like a pencil, there's a little bump. The nylon tips are heated, and pressed over that bump. Once the tip cools, it's extremely difficult for it to come off.

Q: Is there an industry standard that drumstick makers go by in terms of standardized sizes? Like, should every company's 5A be the same, and Rock's be the same, etc?

DAN: Our original Rock size was actually a half-size between Jazz and 5A. That's where it classically was, and we used the classic nomenclature of sticks, which came from a combination of Regal Tip and Ludwig. We used their sizes and their names, because that's what everybody knew. When Moot Wood Turning took over Trueline, they made the Rock and the Classic and Natural Diamond bigger than a 2B, which is what we used to call a 2B Rocker. You'll see in the line that we have a 5B and a 5B Rocker, and the Rock is still like a 2B Rocker. If people ask me what they should play in a wood tip, and say they generally use 5B, I'll say try our 5A, which is down one size. That'll be the feel that they're used to. Some people will say that our sticks are really heavy, and they are. We use only kiln-dried hickory, as opposed to air-dried wood, which tends to leave the starting product lighter. Our sticks do have a heavier feel.

Q: Have you ever had drummers comment that after using Trueline drumsticks, they couldn't go back to anything else?

DAN: Absolutely, and the most vocal are myself and Billy Ward. Billy was the guy that taught the actor in the movie "That Thing You Do," how to play drums. Billy has just gotten back from working with Richard Marx, and he does a great deal of studio work, too. Billy would call up and say, "How you guys doing?" And I'd say "Fine," and he'd say "Good, because if you guys ever went out of business, I'd hunt you down and kill you!"

I've been playing TG sticks since 1987, right after my first tour of the company. My hands play so relaxed, so nice, and so consistently. I don't have to look at my sticks, I don't have to worry about if they're slipping. When I do play traditional sticks, my grip tightens, and my shoulders come up.

Q: How far worldwide are Trueline Drumsticks distributed?

DAN: Some of our better distributors are actually in New Zealand, Mexico, and Germany. We also have distributors in Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, South Korea, and there may be new ones coming up in Ireland and Spain.

Q: Is there a difference in the way that Trueline finishes or lacquers sticks, as opposed to other drumstick manufacturers?

DAN: We do a batch lacquering, which is new to us since 1995, when Moot Wood Turning bought Trueline. You put the batch of sticks in a tumbler, you put in lacquer, and then you tumble. If you have a little burr or sliver, the tumbling process will knock that off. Tumbling also will uniformly coat the sticks, and allows you to put less lacquer on, keeping more of a wood feel to the sticks. In the old days, Lalo and I would dip them one at a time, and hang just 36 pair at a time on a rack. Things have changed, obviously for the better!

Q: Dan, any parting comments before we wrap this up?

DAN: I think the one interesting perspective I have about drummers, is that drummers, like most musicians, are athletes of their own sport. We tend to not notice change, like we'll say, "I've been playing coated bass drum heads my whole life, I'm never going to change". Once drummers get a chance to try either the Natural Diamond and TG's, it opens up a whole new thing. When you try something new, you might find something different that you really like. I find that with the TG models, there are many drummers that are playing them for physical reasons. Some players end up with hands that are so thrashed, they can't hold regular drumsticks. Trueline is one of the main sponsors of DDA, which is the Disabled Drummers Association. Our TG sticks allow drummers, that for whatever predicament their life has them in, whatever disabling condition . . . the grip allows them to hold sticks. We did a big clinic in September, and it was really neat to see some of these drummers be able to hold these sticks, get on the drum set, and see them take a thought from their mind and put it someplace on the drum.

To read more about the Trueline Drumstick Company and Dan Frank, visit the Trueline site at http://www.trueline.com

Trueline Drumsticks are available from
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